Posted on 05/02/2013 7:07:17 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
During an Advanced Placement biology course in Easton Area High School, Jennifer Estevez's teacher sped through the large chapter on evolution, focusing on one formula for the AP exam and the basics: survival of the fittest and natural selection.
In those high school years in Northampton County, she also would attend a Baptist leadership retreat where a speaker denounced evolution as false, unproven science. Seemingly unimportant and even discredited, evolution fell off her radar. So the Easton student, who is a Baptist, arrived at Duquesne University last fall considering herself a creationist, a person who generally believes God created the world as described in the Bible.
But a college biology course convinced her that evolution was valid science with overwhelming evidence that all living things, including humans, evolved most likely from a common ancestor -- over a period of millions, even billions, of years longer than that described in Genesis.
Ending her freshman year, and in pursuit of a career in medicine, Ms. Estevez, 19, said she's "a bit upset" that her high school teacher played down evolution while others trashed the science that serves as the foundation of modern biology, genetics and medicine.
"In high school, a lot was not taught correctly, and it didn't prepare me for college," she said. "They should have gone into evolution in detail. The controversy should not be what is taught in school."
Her experience represents the ill-kept secret about public school biology classrooms nationwide -- that evolution often isn't taught robustly, if at all. Faith-based belief in creationism and intelligent design continues to be discussed and even openly taught in public school classrooms, despite state curriculum standards.
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
Openly taught! Oh the horror! Burn the witches!
Poor widdle baby.
Oh, no!
Unless you become an evolutionist, I can’t see what good this information on competing theories would do you anyway. What happened to teaching kids real skills, like PENMANSHIP?
Next thing you know they will be objecting to the teaching that the Universe began with an act of creation (aka the ‘big bang’).
A creationist in a biology course is many times less dangerous than a liberal in a history or sociology course.
Period.
Anyone ignorant enough to teach creationism to a classroom of kids as science has no business teaching kids anything and they should be fired immediately. People like that will ensure the US falls even further behind in science education. All hail your new overlord China.
There is more to science than just Darwin.
This is a mischaracterization. The bulk of creationist doctrine is modern invention, and in the teachings of the very influential Henry Morris, the Noachic Flood is emphasized as the creative agency responsible for the formation of the earth as geological science finds it.
Creationists are no doubt sincere in their embrace of such teachings as a bulwark to their own Bible based beliefs, but these teachings are not supported by any direct exegesis of the actual description in Genesis I.
I think it is, or was, quite common, and I personally know one retired teacher who openly averred that he did this.
Yes you open the door ...then Buddhist....Islamic..pagan...will be allowed their agendas also. Teach your beliefs at home.
I’m not going to get all wee-wee’d up because Grandpa Simpson avers that he taught Creationism at the Shelbyville High School. Doesn’t strike me as a national crisis requiring journalistic outrage.
evolution is a pack of lies that should not be taught at all - much less to young scientists who are going to medical school. who wants a doctor whos head is full of such rubbish?
Oh my word!!! Truth and reality being taught instead of superstition and imagination?
Please don’t tell me you consider Darwinian evolution “science,” please. It is pure imagination.
Anyone that doesn’t consider it science has never learned what it is. Willful ignorance of the world for fear that it will anger your God is not a virtue.
How did the amino acid building blocks of the very first DNA molecule come into existence, and how were the correct amino acid molecules, of the required isomeric form, selected?
Among my former university faculty colleagues there were some, accomplished, respected, peer reviewed and published scientists, who could not accept the evolutionary model simply on the basis of it mathematical improbability.
Of course they kept their “unorthodoxy” to themselves, inasmuch as the gateways to tenure are guarded by evolutionists.
Not worshipping at the altar of darwin????? Oh how gauche......
Tell me sir in what way is it falsifiable?
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